It is estimated that the Internet industry is growing at a rate of 40% to 50% per year and will include 90 million hosts by the year 2000. The surge in Internet use may be partly attributable to the increasing number of computers in the home and the capability of users to log onto the Internet from home. According to recent statistics, the most common Internet activities remain e-mail and World Wide Web (“Web”) browsing, with most users citing e-mail as the most important application. Today's e-mail programs also send and receive graphics, sound clips and Web page attachments as easily as they send plain text messages.
While the Web provides numerous sources of information on thousands of topics, one disadvantage is that the use of the Web requires that the user be on-line. Being on-line typically requires a user to use a modem to connect his/her personal computer (PC) to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The user then obtains Web access through the modem/ISP connection. Maintaining this type of connection for long periods of time is undesirable for dial up users who must tie up their phone lines while downloading and viewing Web pages.
Another disadvantage of using the Web is that it is passive and requires the user to search its contents to locate desired information. If the user does not know on which Web page the desired information or service resides, he/she needs to search the web for applicable Web pages. This search may prove to be burdensome and is often time consuming for the user. Thus, if a user is using a dial-up modem/ISP connection to the Web, he/she or she will again tie up the phone line for a protracted period of time while he/she formulates a search query and then reviews the returned Web sites for the desired information.
This problem of needing to be on-line also involves obtaining updated information from the Web. If a user desires to see particular Web pages on a periodic basis, such as on a newspaper based Web site, he/she must get on-line, request the desired information and then download the desired Web pages.
Unlike the Web, e-mail actively distributes selected information to the user without requiring the user to initiate the request or search. In addition, e-mail services are more proactive than Web based services, and do not require the user to interact in a more reactive mode.
Another advantage of e-mail is that it does not require the user to maintain an on-line connection while viewing, downloading or responding to e-mail messages. Thus, the user simply establishes an on-line connection to a conventional e-mail server, collects his/her e-mail messages and stores them locally. Once the e-mail messages are stored on a client e-mail device, the user may review them at his/her leisure while off-line from the conventional e-mail server.
One disadvantage of conventional e-mail systems is their inability to actively retrieve Web pages via existing links in Web pages when the mail is being reviewed off-line. For example, while a user may send an e-mail message to another that includes a copy of a Web page as an attachment, the recipient cannot follow the links within the attached Web page to review subsequent Web pages. The conventional method for sending a plurality of Web pages requires sending copies of all the desired Web pages as attachments that are manually selected by the sender of the e-mail message. The recipient must open each copied attachment one by one using a Web browser. The recipient cannot use the links in the Web page to flip between the plurality of attached Web pages. This means that the sender must manually select each individual page, copy it as an attachment to an e-mail message and send it to the recipient. Neither the sender nor the recipient can use the conventional e-mail systems to request and retrieve Web pages for them and forward these Web pages to themselves as part of an e-mail message.